When Comics Meets Sports

Earlier this week when I ran across a Khary Randolph MLB commission piece I asked if he had more art like this. He did. Luckily for us. For good measure we also included a Y.A. Tittle New York Giants piece by Mike DeCarlo.

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In between eating remarkable amounts of Turkey yesterday, I watched with glee as both the Eagles and the Cowboys got their asses kicked on TV. The enclosed sketch is of my first Giants player idol, 1960’s quarterback Y.A.Tittle. He will be my Talisman for this Sunday’s matchup with the Redskins, as my beloved Giants bring me a little joy I hope.

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‘Crime has no borders’ in new Vaughan/Martin teaser

‘The Private Eye’ creative team teases a new project from their Panel Syndicate label.

Looks like the band is getting back together, as the creators of the excellent “pay as you go” digital comic The Private Eye — Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vicente — appear to be reuniting for another project from Panel Syndicate.

Both Panel Syndicate and Vaughan teased the new project on Twitter:

Vaughan also clarified that this is NOT the exclusive The Walking Dead comic that was announced last summer at Image Expo — which is something else we still have to look forward to.

The Private Eye was an interesting experiment — two top-of-their-game creators going out and creating something wonderful, then offering each issue digitally for whatever price their audience was willing to pay. It seems to have worked, as Vaughan said last September:

Even though readers can still pay whatever they want for our DRM-free files (including nothing!), artist Marcos Martin, colorist Muntsa Vicente and I are proud to reveal that The Private Eye is already well into the six figures for both issues downloaded AND dollars earned … and that’s without advertising, corporate backers, Comixology-like distributors, or even a Kickstarter campaign.

If you prefer print, a hardcover of The Private Eye is due out from Image Comics next month. And you can check the teaser out for the new project — in English and Spanish — below.

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Smash Pages Review: The Monster Book of Manga: Steampunk

HarperCollins has been putting out these nicely produced manga-characters books for years, now, and they keep coming up with new subjects and genres.

The Monster Book of Manga: Steampunk
Edited by Jorge Balaguer

HarperCollins has been putting out these nicely produced manga-characters books for years, now, and they keep coming up with new subjects and genres.

Like all the Monster Books of Manga, this book focuses on one thing: Character design. If you’re interested in the basics of anatomy, draftsmanship, and storytelling, this is not the book for you. That said, it may be helpful for the artist who has mastered the basics and is ready to develop some new characters. It’s not so much a how-to book as a collection of examples, though. Balaguer has designed 39 different characters, from a robot to a firefighter to a Victorian lady, and he has given each of them a name and a paragraph of background information. There’s a lot of story in these little paragraphs, and he clearly has a lively imagination, but there’s no information on how to grow your own.

Balaguer takes us through seven steps for each character, from stick figure to finished drawing. Unfortunately, his step-by-step instructions suffer from a common problem: The distance between step 1, a stick figure, and step 2, a fleshed-out drawing of a realistic looking person, is vast. To the beginner, it’s like magic. Everything after that is basically finish—inking, shading, coloring, and adding rivets. Getting from a few sketched lines and circles to something that looks like an actual figure is the hard part—and this book is no help. (The solution is to spend a lot of time drawing from live models, but a book won’t help you there.)

Furthermore, for a book that’s supposed to be about steampunk, there’s precious little talk of how the characters are designed from the inside out, nor is there any attempt to make them seem logical. There’s more to steampunk than drawing rivets on every surface, but you won’t learn that here. Not only that, the rivets don’t even make sense—in some of the figures they not only don’t fasten anything, they would actually get in the way.

While these factors limit its usefulness, this book may provide a helpful toolbox for artists who are interested in the elements of different characters, or the details of how to ink, shade, and color different types of steampunk characters—and it’s certainly enjoyable to browse through it and see the different characters Balaguer has created.

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